Jeju City

The island's own founding story places its beginning in Jeju City: at Samseonghyeol, three hollows in the ground from which the ancestors of the Jeju people are said to have emerged before founding the kingdom of Tamna. Tamna traded with the Korean peninsula, China and Japan and kept a degree of independence until Goryeo absorbed it in the 12th century. After the Mongol invasions the island was run as a Mongol horse pasture for about a century, and the last resistance of the Sambyeolcho, a Goryeo military corps, ended here in 1273.

Under Joseon the island was governed as Jeju Mok from the town that is now the old city, where the governor's compound and the pavilion of Gwandeokjeong, built in 1448, still stand. It was a poor, wind-battered place used as a destination for political exiles, its men lost at sea in numbers and its women working the shore as divers. Contact with the outside world came mostly through shipwreck; Dutch sailors of the Sperwer were stranded here in 1653.

The 20th century was harsh. Japanese rule brought military construction and emigration to Osaka; then, from April 1948, an uprising against the police and the division of the peninsula was followed by a counter-insurgency campaign in which many thousands of islanders were killed and villages burned. The events were barely spoken of for decades and were officially apologised for in 2003. A memorial park on the edge of the city now records them. Jeju City took its present form in the 1950s, grew rapidly after the airport opened the island to mass domestic tourism, and became an administrative city within a special self-governing province in 2006.

Jeju's culture stands apart from the mainland's, and the city is where it is most visible. The island language, which linguists treat as a separate variety, is still heard among older people and is used on signs and in performance. The landscape's basalt supplies the dol hareubang, the squat carved grandfather figures that stand at gateways, and the black stone walls that divide the fields.

Shamanism survived here more strongly than anywhere else in Korea. Village shrines remain in use, and the rites held each spring at a shrine near the harbour to welcome and send off the goddess of the winds were inscribed by UNESCO in 2009. The haenyeo, women who dive without air for abalone, sea urchins and seaweed, are the island's best-known figures and were added to the same UNESCO list in 2016; the trade is ageing, and most working divers are now elderly.

The memory of 1948 runs under everything. The April date is a national memorial day, families across the island keep ancestral rites on the same few days because so many died together, and the subject is treated with care. Alongside this, the city has a large incomer population from the mainland who arrived during the island's boom, opening cafés, guesthouses and galleries, and the tension between that influx and long-established island life is a common topic.

About 485,000 people live in Jeju City, roughly seven in ten of the island's residents, spread between the old town, the inland district of Sinjeju and a ring of coastal villages that were absorbed into the municipality. Growth was rapid through the 2010s as mainlanders moved in, and the built-up area has spread steadily up the lower slopes.

The economy runs on three things: tourism, from hotels and car hire to restaurants and duty-free shopping around Sinjeju; agriculture, above all the tangerine groves that cover the lowlands and are harvested through the winter; and fishing, with the harbour handling cutlassfish, squid and shellfish. Public administration, the university and the airport account for much of the rest. Wages are below the national average while housing and food cost more than on the mainland.

Everyday life is shaped by the weather and the flights. The wind is constant, and the ferry and air timetables are the first thing anyone checks in typhoon season. Markets open early, the noodle and pork restaurants fill at midday, and Yeon-dong is busy late. The standing local arguments concern the pressure of visitor numbers, plans for a second airport in the east of the island, waste and water supply, and the protection of the lava-rock forest known as gotjawal.

Jeju eats differently from the mainland, with pork at the centre rather than beef. The island's black pigs are grilled over charcoal in thick slices and dipped in melchijeot, a salted anchovy sauce that is the local answer to soy; the old town has a street given over to the grill houses. The same pork makes gogi guksu, wheat noodles in a cloudy broth with sliced boiled meat, and the celebratory dombe gogi, boiled pork carved on a wooden board.

Fish comes next. Galchi, the long silver cutlassfish, is grilled whole or stewed with radish and chilli; okdom, a semi-dried tilefish, is grilled and eaten with rice. Abalone appears as a porridge and in hot pots, sea urchin roe is cooked into a brown-seaweed soup, and the seaweed itself goes into momguk, a soup of gulfweed and pork long served at island weddings and funerals. Much of this comes ashore through Dongmun market, which also sells the island's tangerines and hallabong citrus through the winter.

Sweets and drinks are local too. Bingtteok is a thin buckwheat pancake rolled around seasoned radish, and omegi tteok is a millet cake coated in bean powder; both are sold at the market. Jeju makes its own rice wine and a tangerine-flavoured beer, and the island's roasted-barley and citrus drinks are sold everywhere as souvenirs.